Atlantic swells
In realms of
Imagination’s proud island
When you loom down
Beyond the gate

Heroic sight in hand
Turns summer into fall
At midnight
After the storm
Past sleeping fathers
In the churchyard

Daughter for winter’s
Dreadnought
Handsome mirrors hung
Where white tips
Read trees on banks
Of a wild River
South of the
Roaring iron ribs
Midtown

2

When she was young
Diane makes her way
To Ezra Pound incarcerated

Under the shade
His voice a crackly jolt
Birds settle

Asylum’s stand
Of trees
so many birds
Two poets
In the land of brazen
doorsteps
And distant cat-calls

3

Ezra worn from
Traveling to
Where stubborn Bulls
Pace the odes

Young Di Prima
Sitting on a piano
In the niche, her
Smile rests
On my palm

Now the sad rain
Hits our window
Down Bernal Hill
We meet for lunch
With Landry on
24th Street sweet
Moment cherished
Read for your birthday
You kissed me when I said
She raised the bookshelves
Of the neighborhood library
and later found
Duncan and Olson
In the monolithic fable

Amiri:
We be fine

We live in this fire

4

On our island stronghold
Ships arrive

One fatal day mortality
Gloom rude tule grid
The shipyard struggles
A poet bleeds
Under light rain
Every drop
a momentary ocean

Your mind voyaging
Intimate rock forms
In the middle
Of a word
Over darkened slope
Of a hillside

Your voice of liberation
On granite plates

Watch out
Wall Street
The lady brings
Solitude and splendor
Through a door
To the redwoods

Diane I feel
Words riding clouded
So much precision
In right moves, window
Wide open
You were torn
For the poem

Born into traffic
Of sons and daughters
Your library brightens
Single letters words
Like wood finches
In a light snowfall

Back east, one eye
On Whitman’s ponderous
Stone a hand
In ecstatic silence
As seagulls measure
The footsteps
Of a fallen star